Archbishop-Designate Jeffrey S. Grob has four birds, continuing a lifelong love of animals that began when he grew up on a farm in Cross Plains. (Photo courtesy of Chicago Catholic)

You can take the bishop out of the farm, it seems, but you can’t take the farm out of the bishop.

Every morning, Bishop Jeffrey S. Grob gets up and does what he laughingly calls his “farm chores” — feeding and cleaning the cages of the four birds he and his mom Bonnie share their home with.

“There’s a responsibility and commitment. We’re firm believers in that. You hear too many horror stories about people not taking care of their pets,” he said. Caring for animals, in his view, is good for the soul. “Even something as simple as our birds — it means you have responsibility for someone or something else. You don’t get lost in yourself, in your own ego.”

Their family of four birds has its unofficial leader in Windancer, an African Gray parrot. The breed is known to be the “Einstein of parrots,” said Bonnie Grob, and can often have a vocabulary of up to 500 words. In fact, Windancer has learned the names of the other three parrots and takes it upon himself to correct them when they’re getting out of line.

“He has the attitude of a perpetual teenager,” Bishop Grob said.

A love of animals isn’t a recent development for the Grob family. In addition to Rusty, their trusty cattle dog, there was always a pet parrot or cockatiel in the farmhouse in Cross Plains, and as a boy, Bishop Grob was known to make pets of the wild game the family raised on the land. “I had several pet quail,” he recalled. One summer, he adopted an orphaned raccoon that he found crying in a tree. The family named her “Toddy,” fed her milk with an eyedropper and left food out in the machine shed for her.

Eventually Toddy learned to climb on the garage roof and scratch at the kitchen window when she wanted to be fed, and Bonnie Grob would make her Tombstone pizzas after pulling the night shift at her parents’ bar in town. Toddy even returned the following year with a litter of babies, sure that she would find food and hospitality at the Grob home.

“We were ‘Laudato Si’ before ‘Laudato Si,’” quipped Bishop Grob, referencing Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical on care for our common home.